A short film made for Graphics of walking through Liverpool St. station, the images flashing on the right serve as an illustration as to the bussle and chaos of information flying around you as you try to think or have a conversation of your own, these are images relating to recordings of what was overheard.
“My work is really a self-portrait...it is about my own physical engagement with the world...to walk across a country is both a measure of the country itself and also of myself”. Richard Long.
His walks are in their own respect performances I feel, although he would never call them this specifically, as he takes in the landscape and reacts to what is in front of him,the process of walking is integral to the work he creates and always arises through a very organic process.
Long cites Art as “as a formal and holistic description of the real space and experience of landscape and its most elemental materials.” But for Long his work is also about the personal journey he experiences, and in a way what he produces acts as a form of meditation on the relationship between himself and the natural world. This in turn makes his work take on an autobiographical aspect, the photos and sculptures becoming a personal history.
Richard Long has challenged the ideas of where art can and can’t exist and says that a sculpture on top of a mountain has “an imaginative freedom about how and where art can be made in the world.” There is something very ‘other-worldly’ about his works, leaving many locations anonymous so only he might ever know where the work was, save perhaps a few locals who walk past the base of a mountain somewhere in Patagonia and see a collection of rocks or a carefully constructed circle of snow and may never learn of where its origins lie. This sense of mystery and the relationship between man and the natural habitat that surrounds him is what is most intriguing and unique about Long’s concepts. He does not over-complicate or over-theorise, like many other artists do, neither does he place greater importance on his work than is necessary, he unambiguously says “My work has become a simple metaphor for life. A figure walking down his road” 1982.
'IF A TREE IS TOILET PAPERED IN A FOREST AND NO ONE IS AROUND TO SEE IT, DOES ANYONE CARE?' 2008
'CUT OFF MY HAND TO SPITE MY COCK' 2008
- super glued hand to floor of Camden Arts Centre and put a bottle of Acetone just out of reach.
'ALL THE THINGS YOU COULD BE BY NOW IF ROBERT SMITHSON'S WIFE WAS YOUR MOTHER (A REBIRTHING CEREMONY)' 2007
from Alistair MacKinven's book 'Performances 2006 to 2009', works developed over a three year period. Through these performances MacKinven has been concerned with the documentation of original events, staging evidence through film, photography, narrative and storytelling. Mackinven uses performances as another aspect to his work, and through the process of documenting it and presenting that, giving an alternative way of looking at his work.
Having been looking at performance artists recently who camouflage themselves in everyday surroundings, when a Graphics group project was set to map a 5 minute radius all ways from a certain point on Hampstead Heath, we seized the oppurtunity to map the environment and terrain with our own bodies and went about making 'ghillie suits' that were made up of the exact shrubbery, grass, leaves etc. that each journey was comprised of.
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